Retail News CRM

Tag: experience

  • Amazon Go aims to change retail by eliminating check-out lines

    Amazon Go aims to change retail by eliminating check-out lines

    Amazon.com is using machine learning to try to change the shopping experience and the retail industry in general. Amazon employees are testing a new brick-and-mortar store, called Amazon Go, in Seattle that lets customers using an app bypass the checkout line.

    Using a combination of machine learning, computer vision, sensors and deep learning, the smart store is designed to keep track of what users take off and return to shelves so it can track their purchases in a virtual cart. When they’re done, customers can just leave the store with their purchases; Amazon will charge their account and send them a receipt.

    “We created the world’s most advanced shopping technology so you never have to wait in line,” the company said on its site. “With our Just Walk Out Shopping experience, simply use the Amazon Go app to enter the store, take the products you want, and go! No lines, no checkout. (No, seriously.)”

    The 1,800-square-foot store, located at 2131 7th Ave. in Seattle, is in beta testing now so only Amazon employees are able to use it. The company expects it to be open to the general public in early 2017.

    The store sells pre-made meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner and snacks made by on-site chefs and local bakeries. It also stocks milk and bread, along with meal kits, local chocolates and artisan cheese.

    Customers only need an Amazon account, a smartphone and the Amazon Go app.

    “Four years ago we asked ourselves: what if we could create a shopping experience with no lines and no checkout?,” Amazon said in its statement. “Could we push the boundaries of computer vision and machine learning to create a store where customers could simply take what they want and go? Our answer to those questions is Amazon Go and Just Walk Out Shopping.”

    Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, said he’s intrigued by the concept and a bit surprised that a major retail brand already ensconced in brick-and-mortar stores didn’t come up with it first.

    “Automatic checkout is absolutely a characteristic of the store of the future,” said Moorhead. “But I can see Amazon doing this to drive even more growth by going brick-and-mortar. The only way to be successful in brick-and-mortar is to change the game, and in this case, changing the game with checkout.”

    He also noted that this is a good use of smart technology.

    “This is the ultimate way to use this technology in retail,” said Moorhead. “The challenge with all technology like this is accuracy. What if the system charges you for something you didn’t take? That could be the big challenge to the system.”

    Lees ook:

    Lees ook:

  • Nokia unveils machine learning-powered customer experience solutions

    Nokia unveils machine learning-powered customer experience solutions

    Nokia has powered major updates to its Motive Customer eXperience Solutions (CXS) software portfolio, promising communications service providers with advanced machine learning capabilities to reduce costs and improve customer experiences.

    Nokia Motive Service Management Platform (SMP) 7.0 and Motive Care Analytics (CAL) 2.0 use machine-learning algorithms developed by Nokia Bell labs — advanced capabilities that give computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.

    With support for machine learning in its CXS portfolio, Nokia aims to set a new standard for proactive care in the industry, dramatically improving the detection, troubleshooting and resolution of subscriber issues.

    Nokia Motive SMP 7.0 features Dynamic Intelligent Workflows, a new self-optimizing system that determines the ideal sequence of tasks that deliver the highest probability of resolving billing, subscription and network service issues in the shortest amount of time.

    By analyzing data from previous workflow executions, the network, customer premises equipment, and trouble tickets, this capability enables service providers to quickly find the optimal remediation to issues when subscribers contact help desk agents or use self-care.

    Nokia Motive CAL 2.0 is the first solution of its kind that automatically correlates customer help desk calls and self-care actions with network, service and third-party application topologies to identify call anomalies, such as unusual patterns in help desk calls that indicate the location of customer-impacting network and service issues.

    Together, Motive SMP 7.0 and Motive CAL 2.0 help service providers lower costs by reducing average help desk handling times 5% to15% and eliminating inappropriate truck rolls (dispatching a service technician to a customer location) related to network outages by as much as 90%.

    Lees ook:

    Lees ook:

    Lees ook:

  • Lane Crawford selects Orange Services’ Cloud to improve digital shopping experience

    Lane Crawford selects Orange Services’ Cloud to improve digital shopping experience

    Orange Business Services has been selected by Lane Crawford, a multi-brand designer label luxury retailer, to provide a cloud-based platform to extend, secure and manage its IT resources in Hong Kong and China. This deployment will enable Lane Crawford to marry offline strengths with digital advantages and offer its customers a more connected retail experience.

    Founded in 1850, Hong Kong-based Lane Crawford is widely recognized as a leading retailer of specialty and luxury goods in Hong Kong and China. Through Orange Business Services’ cloud platform, Lane Crawford will have higher flexibility and scalability to accommodate changes in demand due to seasonal shopping, sales and promotional activities, and ad-hoc use. By adopting a cloud-based platform, Lane Crawford can appropriately align its business with the rapid growth of online shopping in China and meet the needs of new and existing customers.  In addition to meeting Lane Crawford’s needs for its digital transformation, Orange Business Services’ solution delivers an enhanced level of security infrastructure and business continuity plans.

     “Lane Crawford has a long history of delivering high quality products and excellent experiences to its customers,” said Jack Zhang, General Manager, Orange Business Services China.  “We are very pleased to have been selected as a partner in their digital transformation journey and to support them based on our deep understanding of the retail business and Lane Crawford’s existing infrastructure environment.”

    Lane Crawford selected Orange Business Services’ cloud platform for its ability to easily scale to meet rapid changes in consumer demand and its one-stop solution for all the needs it had for connectivity, flexibility and security.  Orange Business Services’ platform is fully compatible with other business critical applications being used by Lane Crawford.

     “Our former infrastructure did not provide adequate flexibility for scalability or future business growth,” said Raymond Liu, Senior Manager, IT Infrastructure, Lane Crawford.  “Orange Business Services’ cloud-based solution gives us cost-efficient performance, enhanced security and protection, and support of on-line transaction applications.  For Lane Crawford, this is a critical step forward in our digital transformation.”

    Lees ook:

    Lees ook:

  • QVC Japan taps Verint to enhance quality assurance, customer experience

    QVC Japan taps Verint to enhance quality assurance, customer experience

    TV shopping firm QVC Japan is leveraging Verint Workforce Optimization in its in-country contact centers to drive operational improvements, as well as enhance the quality of calls and productivity of its customer service agents.

    QVC is also using and benefitting from Verint Speech Analytics, which continues to play an important role in its focus on customer engagement.

    Having used the Verint Workforce Optimization and Customer Analytics solutions for three years, QVC Japan is capturing, analyzing and acting on feedback from its customers to help ensure consistency in its service approach and deliver positive experiences.

    “QVC Japan was the first operation in the QVC global network to implement Verint’s workforce optimization and analytics solutions, and based on our positive results, we have gained a lot of attention,” said Masukawa, customer experience manager at QVC Japan.

    In particular, the combination of quality management and speech analytics helps us determine how best to maximize customer and other business insights coming into our operations and then apply them to new measures.”

    The QVC quality team was the first to introduce workforce optimization and speech analytics to the organization. In doing so, the business has increased quality scores, while enhancing productivity across its teams. Upon experiencing these results, QVC Japan’s customer experience division implemented the Verint Speech Analytics solution.

    By leveraging the data and valuable insights from the voices of its customers, the company says it is better able serve them, meet their expectations, and develop and launch compelling marketing initiatives and campaigns.

  • Launch of Indonesia’s First Samsung Galaxy Studio Experience Center

    Launch of Indonesia’s First Samsung Galaxy Studio Experience Center

    The latest Samsung gadgets that can be connected to handsets are available for customers to view and purchase. Not only Galaxy smartphones and tablets are on display, but also the entire Galaxy ecosystem, such as the Gear VR and Gear S2, as well as other Samsung products. Data packages are also available to provide internet access as well as digital content to make it easier for customers to access the digital world.

    The Galaxy Studio Experience Center, located at Indosat Ooredoo’s store at Sarinah in Central Jakarta, has a new design that has never been used by other network operators. It is also more spacious to allow better interaction between customers, who can enjoy experience a digital lifestyle, such as iflix video streaming on a big screen and music streaming on Spotify.

    IM3 Ooredoo subscribers can also purchase data packages such as Freedom Combo, Freedom Postpaid and Super Plan, to watch TV shows and films on iflix for hours without using their main data quota.

    The experience center is a strategic cooperation between the two companies to support retail sales. Indosat Ooredoo and Samsung both have the vision of giving customers an enjoyable and satisfactory experience with the Studio Experience Center.

    Indosat Ooredoo director Joy Wahjudi said the experience center was established to provide a one-stop service for Indonesians.

    The two companies are both committed to establishing experience centers to enable customers to obtain information and try out the latest products and services.

    “We aim to also establish studio experience centers in other Indosat Ooredoo stores,” Joy said.

    Lees ook:

    Lees ook:

  • Enhancing last mile delivery, consumer experience with SMS Services

    Enhancing last mile delivery, consumer experience with SMS Services

    E-commerce is a fast-moving game and major forces are changing the rules. Forward-thinking retailers are investing to maximize the potential of both physical and digital channels. Global players that once stood on the sidelines are now poised to compete in South East Asia. Just recently, Indonesian department store chain MatahariMal raised $500 million to develop their e-commerce venture. Alibaba too, has invested $249 million in SingPost to expand their delivery network in SEA.

    As the world’s fastest growing internet region with 260 million users, South East Asia is fast becoming a unique e-commerce market. Primed for tough competition, e-commerce companies are fast prioritizing customer service as a way to stand out from their competitors. Keeping customers at the heart of their business strategy, and delivering the best possible value to them is becoming more important than ever.

    Today, last-mile delivery has become a priority for both e-commerce companies and their customers. Ensuring speedy, but prompt delivery has been proven to give companies an edge in the competitive landscape, while showing customers that companies could go the extra mile for them.

    In fact, local and regional players have still emerged as early winners, largely due to their ability to provide a better-tailored experience for local consumers than what global competitors usually offer. For instance, Singapore-based Lazada built local logistics footprints in each market to increase delivery reliability, and added motorbike fleets to provide speedier options to traditional truck deliveries.

    That said, enhancing last-mile delivery for consumers in the region comes with its own set of challenges.

     Consumer trust, diversity, slow infrastructure serve as roadblocks

    Firstly, the lack of consumer trust is one of the challenges the Southeast Asian e-commerce market is facing. Consumers today are wary of making transactions online due to various security issues such as fraud. According to the e-conomy SEA report by Google and Temasek Holdings, 58 percent of citizens in South East Asia expressed concerns over financial information being shared online. With cyber attacks on the horizon, trust between customers and e-commerce companies have been shaken and today, assurances must be given to customers on a consistent basis to maintain strong relationships.

    The region also encompasses a wide range of ethnicities, languages, consumer preferences and regulations, coupled by a politically and economically complex landscape. With such diversity, consumers in different markets have conflicting preferences and expectations, which means more time and money must be invested carefully into business planning to ensure that this is addressed adequately.

    Despite the immensely positive steps taken towards ASEAN economic integration, there are still socio-political and economic issues that can put a dampener on overall business growth of regional delivery companies.

    Southeast Asia also lacks a solid regional payment and logistics infrastructure, which were the foundation for China’s astounding digital-retail growth. Even though larger businesses today are investing in the development of delivery infrastructure, they are still weak and getting your goods delivered affordably and efficiently may still be an issue. As a result, organisations often find it a challenge to make a scalable business model work, and to justify the high levels of initial investment.

    The use of SMS to represent reliability and optimization

    In order to manage deliveries in a reliable and robust manner while ensuring customer trust is being built, e-commerce companies are looking at the option of sending SMS notifications to customers, and are turning to SMS services to manage the surge in SMSs.

    SMS services have been selected over mobile apps as it is ideally equipped for both application-to-person (A2P) or machine-to-machine (M2M) applications. While not a popular choice of communication between people today, businesses still leverage SMS because it is always delivered even when customers do not have smartphones or data connection, representing reliability and consistency.

    This step is critical for business continuity as it helps to ensure continued trust with customers. To best manage their communication processes when it comes to delivery, e-commerce companies can consider working with a messaging solutions provider to create a reliable and efficient distribution process and enhance overall customer experience.

    By outsourcing their communication processes to messaging solutions, companies can efficiently manage the large volume of messages they send to customers and delivery partners, through unlimited scalability and transmission capacity.

    Through implementing SMS messaging services, delivery processes are more convenient and transparent for e-commerce companies, their business partners and customers. SMS services can not only be used during the registration process to authenticate customers’ account mobile numbers, but also more importantly, update recipients on specific parcel delivery information such as estimated time of arrival.

    By selecting a provider with high quality of service, reliability, security levels and transparency, e-commerce companies can experience increased customer and partner satisfaction as communication becomes more efficient with important messages being sent and delivered in seconds.

    Lees ook:

  • Teradata boosts customer experience with behavioral insights

    Teradata boosts customer experience with behavioral insights

    Teradata now offers the Teradata Customer Journey Analytic Solution, a complete set of capabilities for discerning the behavioral paths of each individual customer.

    The solution determines the next best interaction and delivering a consistent, personalized brand experience through every channel and touch point. It also uses Teradata’s consulting services, as well as technologies that enable real-time customer data integration, advanced behavioral analytics and multi-channel marketing automation.

    Further, the solution enables CMOs who want to truly understand each individual customer experience to move beyond old school one-to-one marketing tactics that rely on purchases and traditional customer profiling.

    The insights resulting from Teradata’s Customer Journey Analytic Solution enable marketers to optimize objectives such as response and conversion rates, service delivery, churn, and customer satisfaction – leading directly to high-impact business outcomes such as increased revenue and customer retention.

    Customers today require every interaction with a brand to be consistent, but also personalized and relevant. This is despite the ever-expanding range of channels that make building a complete picture of each individual customer extremely challenging.

    “Managing every customer as an individual, based on their interactions with your company, requires not only the integration of different types of data but understanding it through the application of complex multi-genre analytics,” said Dan Harrington, EVP for consulting and support services of Teradata. “Even the best-known companies feel this is a ‘boil the ocean’ project – making sense of billions of events for millions of customers, in real time.”

    Lees ook:

    Lees ook:

    Lees ook:

  • Amdocs enhances personalized mobile video experiences

    Amdocs enhances personalized mobile video experiences

    Amdocs has made available new capabilities within the Amdocs Omni-Channel Experience solution to allow mobile service providers to connect to content and application providers (CAPs) to deliver new and creative digital services to users.

    Via integration with Google’s publicly available mobile data plan application program interface (API), the Amdocs Omni-Channel Experience solution has been initially deployed to interoperate with Google’s YouTube app, and in the future may be able to be deployed to support other Google services and CAPs who are using the same API.

    The interoperability of the Amdocs solution with YouTube’s mobile app allows improved in-app data transparency and data transactions. YouTube will be able to offer customers the ability to view YouTube videos offline at reduced rates during off-peak hours, thereby allowing service providers to shift traffic from peak hours to times when their network is underused, providing dynamic pricing opportunities and ensuring better viewing quality.

    Data balance and rate information will be provided by the Amdocs Omni-Channel Experience solution, enabling service providers to present this information in a consistent way across different customer touch points, including YouTube’s mobile app.

    “Working together with Google, we are offering service providers innovative ways to cater to the digital lifestyle of today’s Generation C consumers and power their businesses with new, digitally-enabled capabilities, building customer trust through data transparency and increasing business value through network traffic optimization,” said Chris Williams, head of global marketing at Amdocs.

    Lees ook:

    Lees ook:

    Lees ook:

    Lees ook:

  • Imposium launches cloud-based ad platform

    Imposium launches cloud-based ad platform

    Imposium has launched a platform that provides marketers, advertisers, media planners, buyers, and creative directors to harness personalized, dynamic, contextualized video.

    The eponymous platform is a real-time video ad generator that promises to deliver algorithmic video for commercials and entertainment with a highly personalized, one-to-one viewer experience.

    The platform analyzes existing customer profiles and behavior data then dynamically generates relevant, personalized ads on the fly. These ads are then delivered in the form of a data-driven “video story” that features your product, brand, or narrative using Imposium’s proven backend technology.

    As a cloud-based dynamic platform, Imposium’s delivery of ads works inside browsers or mobile apps, and even on-site for experiential installments. It uses both context and relevance to deliver the most optimized advertising experience possible to audiences.

    These personalized ads allow marketers to hyper-target prospects by things like geography, social profiles, interests, or relevant real life events. These elements allow Imposium to generate highly informed, pre-educated candidates that result in greater conversions and sales.

    “With this type of contextual marketing, we connect brands and storytellers with target demographics like never before,” said Jason Nickel, president of Imposium.

    “In a world dominated by video marketing, Imposium enables online and experiential video campaigns to be very personal, with a format that uses elements made for many, but appears to be produced just for you,” said Nickel.

  • Alibaba taps VR to enhance shopping experience

    Alibaba taps VR to enhance shopping experience

    The global virtual reality market to grow at a rate of 96% by 2019, according to a new report made available by Research and Markets.

    VR is being adopted in a wide variety of applications ranging from healthcare, gaming devices, public entertainment, prototype creation to military exercises.

    Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has now set up a research lab as it looks to use VR to enhance the shopping experience for its 400 million users.

    The company is also exploring how VR technology can be applied to its other services, including online games and video streaming, according to reports.

    Head-mounted displays have created opportunities for VR in a number of applications. A head-mounted display consists of an image source, collimating optics, and a mechanism to mount the device on the head.

    The device is wearable, and projects images and information relative to the user’s line of sight in front of the user. A report on the HMD market predicts growth of 49% over the next five years.

    Virtual reality devices, which are compatible with smartphones, can help users by providing specific information about their requirement on-the-go, without pulling out their portable devices. This technology is expected to commercialize in 2016 and could be worth $2.30 million in 2016.

    Alibaba has already created three-dimensional visuals for hundreds of products and will issue standards for merchants to create VR-enabled shopping options. It is also said to be working on creating music and videos.

    Lees ook:

    Lees ook:

  • How UK Retailers Can Embrace The Chinese Ecommerce Opportunity

    How UK Retailers Can Embrace The Chinese Ecommerce Opportunity

    Within the next two years, China’s e-commerce market will top $1 trillion, making it bigger than the e-commerce markets of the US, UK, Japan, Germany, and France combined. Fuelled by greater internet and smartphone penetration, an expanding middle class with higher disposable income, and greater consumer confidence, over half of Chinese internet users having now made a purchase on the web.

    Surely then, UK retailers should be fighting tooth and nail for the loyalty and spend of these Chinese shoppers?

    Surprisingly, this is not the case. While over half of UK retailers (55%) ship to China, our research – into the international shopping experience offered by the UK’s top 150 online retailers – shows a massive variation in the quality of shopping experiences offered to Chinese shoppers.

    UK e-tailers are failing to accommodate a great number of Chinese shopping preferences and reducing the likelihood of conversions. For example, just over a quarter (26%) of retailers that ship to China offer shoppers the ability to pay in Yuan and present prices in local currency.

    The remainder are leaving shoppers in China to estimate for themselves how much products will cost to buy, which means shoppers could be hit by sudden currency exchange fluctuations or fees from their bank.

    Similarly, only 22% of retailers that ship to China offer shoppers the ability to pay using local payment methods, such as e-wallets and bank transfers like Alipay or Tenpay, which account for more than 80% of ecommerce payments, or Chinese payments cards such as UnionPay.

    Of retailers that do accept Chinese payment methods, 42% offer a single option, barring some prospective customers from making a purchase.

    Added to this, just one in ten (10%) retailers that ship to China offer shoppers a Mandarin-language shopping experience. Since the majority of people living in China don’t speak English fluently, shoppers are likely to feel unconfident about making a purchase if they are expected to use an English-language checkout.

    It’s clear from these customer experience shortcomings that the majority of UK retailers are failing to exploit the burgeoning Chinese ecommerce market fully. This puts them on the back foot when it comes to winning long term loyalty and purchasing preference.

    Retailers simply can’t afford to offer shoppers a second rate experience, especially when failing to localise the online store can make shoppers nervous and can quickly sour a great online experience.

    So, how can retailers rectify this and improve the customer experience to grow sales in China?

    Here are our top tips-

    •       Improve the experience for Chinese shoppers. The first rule of international trade is that, in order to be successful, customers must enjoy the same experience regardless of where they are in the world. Retailers should offer shoppers in China the same, high quality experience that shoppers in the UK and elsewhere expect to receive.

    •       Offer multiple shipping options at reasonable rates. To give Chinese shoppers the confidence to buy, retailers must offer greater choice as well as competitive prices. This is especially critical in China where clearance processes can be very lengthy for non-experienced carriers. Moreover, it’s important to have a simple and transparent returns process in place, so if something goes wrong, shoppers will be confident that it will be resolved quickly and easily.

    •       Display prices in Chinese Yuan. There are few things more off-putting than exchange rate uncertainty when buying from a retailer in another country, and this is particularly disconcerting at times of high currency fluctuation. Retailers should present shoppers in China with prices in the local currency, so that shoppers can feel confident about how much they are paying.

    •       Try to put the customer’s mind at ease. Most shoppers in China expect and prefer to pre-pay customs charges or handling fees when shopping online, so retailers should avoid any potential for nasty surprises, by being upfront about these charges and offering pre-payment.

    With e-commerce sales in China set to exceed $1 trillion next year, retailers must pay more attention to China in the years ahead. However, delivering a localised shopping experience doesn’t have to require a dedicated Chinese website or months spent negotiating with the local supply chain.

     

    Lees ook: